The Best Australian Yarn 2024: Top 50 longlist of finalists announced

Writers from across Australia embraced the third year of The Best Australian Yarn short story competition — submitting a staggering 6020 entries, which have now been whittled down to a top 50.

Since submissions closed in August, panels of expert judges have read every story to come up with an elite list that encompasses all aspects of Australian life.

The competition is the richest of its kind in the world and has gone from strength to strength since it was established in 2022, attracting more than 16,000 entries and unearthing new talent around the country.

WA writer David Harris was the inaugural winner, while Jacqueline MacDonald, from Tasmania, won last year with her story Split Life.

South Australian entrant Abby Guy, a PhD student at Flinders University, entered the competition for the first time this year and was thrilled to hear her story, A Tomato Grave for a Tomato Man, had landed in the top 50.

Guy fixed on a career as a writer when she was a child and it is her youthful experiences living in Broome that shaped her entry about a man who is ultimately consumed by his obsession.

Each Saturday, one of the top 50 stories will be published in The West Australian’s Agenda section — illustrated by designer Naomi Craigs — and Guy’s story will be the first to feature.

READ THE TOP 50 ENTRIES HERE

For the first time, the competition will award prizes for the best comic story, both in a general section and in two Youth sections.

The decision to include the new categories recognises the rapidly growing appeal of graphic novels and reflects the competition’s aim to provide opportunities to all storytellers.

Two prizes introduced last year — the Navitas English as a Second Language Prize and the First Nations Storytelling Prize — continue to attract hundreds of contestants.

The Best Australian Yarn, run by The West Australian in partnership with education provider Navitas, has a rich $80,000 prize pool.

The overall winner will receive the $50,000 major prize and the runner-up $4000. Eight other finalists will receive $1000 each.

The winners of the Regional, First Nations and ESL prizes each take home $3000, while the winners of two Youth prizes, supported by the Education Department through the Premier’s Reading Challenge, are awarded $1500 each.

The winner of the Comic Story Prize gets $3000 and the two Youth Comic Story Prize winners each get $1500.

The prize jury is chaired by the Editor-in-Chief of WA Newspapers, Christopher Dore, and includes authors Robert Drewe, Holden Sheppard and Rachael Johns — who joins the jury for the first time — and publishers Terri-ann White and Rachel Bin Salleh.

All the prize winners will be announced at an awards night at the WA State Library on November 22.

Seven West Media’s national masthead The Nightly is a supporting partner of the competition together with the WA branch of the Children’s Book Council of Australia, Writing WA, the Perth Comic Arts Festival and the Department of Planning, Lands and Heritage of WA.

The Best Australian Yarn’s Top 50 for 2024

A Smatter of Facts - Anne Vick

A Tomato Grave for a Tomato Man - Abby Guy

An Emotional Geography - James Batty

An Unkindness of Ravens - Ava Berryman

Bang Bang - Wayne McOnie

Broken Eggs - Louise Walton

Brother, Dear - Jackson Millwood

Caged in a Castle - Alexandra Kilroy

Crossing Boundaries - Alida Watson

Da Ya Think I’m Sexy? - CV Hawthorne

Date Night - Alison Davis

Defiantly Interesting - Averil Robertson

Dial-Up AI Therapy - Tim Galbally

Dingo - William Ross Hudson

Domesticated - Naomi Nixon

Enter Sandman - Stephen Kirkaldy

Erased - Shannon Benton

Flag Fall - Thomas Greenbank

Flutter - Sam Carmody

La Ricetta Di Famiglia - David Harris

Me, Pete and the American - Frank Leggett

Metamorphism - Sarah Fakhouri

Model Minority - Clarissa Kwee

Paper Bird - David Piper

Parallax Error - Brylle Tabora

Poison Song - James Bainbridge

Remembering the Hungry Ghosts - Emmi Khor

Resurrection - Pamela Dasher Kaplan

Rip - Mira MT

Savage Daughter - Joanne Patmore

Seabird, Seabird - Isabelle Biondi Saville

Sky, Fire, Mountain - Patrick Forrest

Smothering the Red Flame - Lily Karsten

Such Small Hands in the Blue Afternoon - Monica Tanos

Tell Me How It Ends - Joel Jackson

The Barn - Tim Loveday

The Bleeding Station - Sam Cecins

The Bush Behind My Place - Morris Bryant

The Carer - Melanie Schleiger

The Everywhen - Angus MacGregor

The Girl - Kate O’Connor

The Impossible - Howard McKenzie-Murray

The Last Days of Harold Bloom - Maria-Jose Sanchez

The New Utopians - Caroline Dehn

The Nightwatchman - Robert Boland

The Story Teller’s Coat - Sally Webb

The Strangest Night of 1986 - James Hughes

Vanilla … Then Cinnamon - Anson Cameron

When Winter Ends - V. M. Lin

Withdrawal - Erin Harding